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Underlight has had player-created missions for years and years and years.

Roleplaying is enforced, so that naturally turns a lot of people off of the game. But in addition to the fact that it is a very social game, (You could get to the upper spheres (levels 70+) without killing a single player or monster, if you really wanted to.. Some do), PvP is handled really well.

There are 8 "Great Houses" that most players end up joining. Beyond dueling and such, most of the PvP is done in wars between the Houses. You always have your housemates at your back, and you always have someone to go kill, if you like. Most houses, except the Alliance of the Eclipse (which is a pacifist house), keep Kill on Sight, and Seek and Kill lists, which they populate with the names of the enemies of their houses. And some of the more militant houses (Dreamers of Light, and House Calenture) are usually either fighting a war, or conspiring to start one.

So there isn't a lack of PvP, but it is handled really well. None of it is random.

SOE currently offers their All Access Pass :

"If you play more than one SOE game, or you want to try the other great SOE games available, SOE All Access opens the SOE game catalog to you.

SOE All Access grants access to all current games published by SOE*, which includes: EverQuest® EverQuest® Macintosh Edition PlanetSide EverQuest® Online Adventures Station Pass access, which includes the popular games Infantry Online, Cosmic Rift and Tanarus

Full access to these games for the low monthly subscription price of $21.99 is a potential savings of more than $18.00 every month over the total cost of the individual subscriptions!"


PlayNC (NCSoft) does not offer such a deal but is a central site for managing your online game subscriptions and I imagine once Guild Wars, Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault and others are released, we may start to see some special offers from them as well.


Skotos has been offering this type of service for a long time. For one monthly fee you can access and play all 11 of the games that they offer. Only 2 are graphical MMOGs (Meridian 59 and Underlight), but the other games are very good as well.


The largest factor in offering multiple "A list" titles for one monthly fee is offsetting development (and in the case of MMOGs, maintenance) costs and bringing in enough revenue to show a good profit. The bottom line is always a driving factor in any business. However, there is hope. As technology moves forward, we will start to see more and more rapid development of MMOGs of higher quality and consequently we should start to see a wider array of offerings and price points.


I also agree that some sports games should start to appear on the scene. XBox Live will probably be a driving factor to this more than anything. Playing football online against other players is quite fun and should prove to be very popular considering the amount of sports console games sold. Now, as to whether that genre will move to PC is yet to be seen, but as I mentioned before, in SOE's All Access Pass, they combine online console and PC subscriptions into one package. A diverse product line benefits them in this case. More comapnies need to grow in the genre and diversify at the same time, but that takes time and money. Soon though... very soon.

In addition there is a MMORPG company, Lyra Studios, which wants someone to port their game client for Underlight to Linux. Underlight is a pretty cool MMORPG which actually focuses on *gasp* Role-Playing and player interaction. It's pretty cool, and they just need someone with the necessary experience to port it. So, if you are a Game Programmer with experience in DirectX and OpenGL and such, and would like to help out with this, contact Lyra.

Note: I am not a Lyra Employee, I'm just someone who really likes Underlight, and would love to play it under his OS of choice.

...with the entertainment consisting in exploration and storyline rather than in player status and achievement.

Sounds like the closest thing yet to an actual online RPG, and it's not even being called a MMORPG

Bartle wrote long ago how there are four types of online gamers -- killers, achievers, socializers, and explorers. While this may be somewhat simplistic, it turns out to be pretty accurate. This game simply focuses on Exploration and Socialization. The Sims Online focuses on Socialization and Achievement (get into those top-10 lists!). AC2 focuses almost entirely on Killing.

There are lots of "actual online RPGs" out there, they just never made it very big. If you want true roleplaying, try out Underlight for example.

Besides, I don't see anything how this game is going to "enforce roleplaying" at all.

The makers of Underlight has been advocating this feature in their game for years now, so why has it's popularity deteriorated so much since it was started?

I highly recomend Underlight. It takes the multiplayer and online aspects which you seem to be looking for and ontop of that is completely cooperative and interactive. Many women play the game as well as many couples who like it because you are able to advance and play the game with social interaction as opposed to hack and slash, kill the badens.